Chromebooks Grab Share in Back-to-School Purchases

All through this year, market research news has been very dreary for PCs and PC equipment makers. Tablets often grab headlines for cutting into PC marketshare, but, increasingly, Chromebooks--portable computers based on Google's cloud-centric Chrome OS--are presenting a viable alternative to standard laptops.

Now, hard data is coming in on how various classes of computing hardware fared during the back-to-school period, and Chromebooks are one of the big bright spots. In fact, research from the NPD Group shows that Chromebooks, which didn’t exist in the back-to-school period for 2012, added almost 175,000 units to the market this year and provided all the growth in the challenged notebook market.